This postcard photograph lacks a studio mark, and it was not mailed.
(The Genealogical Note, below, identifies the children’s birthplace as Richmond, California.)
Richmond is a city that borders both the San Francisco Bay and the St. Pablo Bay in west-central California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond,_California
Consequently, we will have difficulty learning any details about the children who are pictured here.
Sometime before 1920, Viola Barrett, age 6, posed with her brother, Marvin, who was 3 years old.
(I am assuming that the charming children with the same surname are siblings – they could be cousins.)
The two are standing in front of dense foliage, perhaps a hedge or luxuriant bush.
In other postcard stories, we have noted how postcard portraiture changed as individual, hand-held cameras became more popular in the years after 1910.
(The Kodak “Brownie” camera was introduced in 1900, but was improved in successive years and grew in popularity.)
This photograph was made, probably by a parent or adult friend, outside a studio.
One finds that the quality of postcard photographs becomes more uneven as amateur photographers proliferated.
In this photograph, there is less clarity and definition than one usually finds in a studio portrait.
Nevertheless, the children are delightful.
Their clothing is less bulky and restrictive than one would find a few years earlier.
Viola wears a neatly-ironed light-colored dress; Marvin sports knickers and a kind of tunic over a loose-fitting blouse.
The children are barefooted -which is expected at the time.
Whether or not the two were affectionate with one another, they are holding hands in the photograph -which is a nice detail.
One hopes that Viola and Marvin had a happy childhood and a successful life in the twentieth century.
GENEALOGICAL NOTE:
It was a long-shot, but I started a search for Marvin.
(Because most women who married also changed their names, it is usually faster to look for the male.)
Thanks to the very nice indexing of the Family Search pages (a site supported by the Church of Latter Day Saints), I found Marvin and Viola.
Marvin Barrett was born in Richmond, California in 1910.
His sister, Viola, was born about 1906.
His parents were James K. Barrett and Mabel (nee Marine) Barrett.
He appears with his sister, Viola, in the US Census for 1920.
James Barrett was born in Ireland in 1883.
Mother, Mabel, was born in California in 1887; she died in California in 1926 (Marvin was 16 years old.)
In 1937, Marvin married Alma Janice Davies, but the couple had no children.
Marvin died in 1951 at age 41.
Viola does not appear to have married.
Viola died in Pittsburgh. PA in 1992 at the age of 86.
